ICANN unleashes the mother of all domain-name land grabs

Have you ever gone to a website with a .jobs address, or a .mobi URL, or one that ends in .biz or .info? If you have, then you’ve visited one of the newer additions to the internet’s central directory system, so-called “top level domains” that were created by the entity that runs the system, which is known as ICANN. On Thursday, the agency launched a new program to add even more domain names to the system, despite the fact that some believe there is no need for them. According to these critics — a group that includes the Federal Trade Commission — the move will unnecessarily complicate the internet’s structure, and the only ones who will benefit are domain-name registrars, many of whom sit on the ICANN board.

This might sound like a great idea if you happen to be a domain-name registrar, who charges users annual fees to provide them with a domain name for their website or service, but to many it sounds like a recipe for chaos — and for lawsuits. The Association of National Advertisers says it is worried that this domain-name land rush will result in fraudsters snapping up brand-name domains by the bucketload, leaving corporations who own those brands to go after them all one by one. The federal Commerce Department has raised a red flag on that issue as well, saying it will create unnecessary headaches.

My sense is that a lot of this demand is just absolutely artificial and largely imagined by the ICANN board. We’re an agency that’s required to protect consumers, and from our perspective, this is a potential disaster.

To make matters worse, critics say that ICANN won’t be notifying companies if someone tries to set up a domain name that looks like a trademark infringement (although the agency said it will be posting the applications publicly so people can track that for themselves), nor has it agreed to block certain domains from being created by adding them to a blacklist. Opponents of an application will have 60 days to file a response, and ICANN says it will be doing a “full background review” to ensure that those registering new top-level domains don’t have a record of fraudulent or anti-competitive activity.